Originally Posted by DArtagnan
KoA as a concept was somewhat doomed (at least in terms of competing with TES numbers) - and everyone at the company supporting it as a great idea are, at least partially, responsible.

You don't combine two wildly different genres and expect to make a huge profit. You have to understand your audience - and you have to understand the genre.

I agree with that and would like to add that one of big reason it failed imo is that world was empty and uniteresting with MMO like quests.IDK how they expected sales numbers similar to skyrim or FO:NV when they had no quality to match.

I will give you another perspective : why there is no challenger to Football Manager series ? okay there is the "other game" but it is a very sorry alternative …
FM ( Eidos - Sports Interactive) has :
Huge fan fanbase
Huge database
thousands of old time beta testers
100's of amateur scouts that monitor all leagues around the world
Massive previous experience on what works and what doesn't
People who don't buy their yearly release but will buy every two years anyway
Series going on since 1994 (or 93?) so their target age is from 10 to 50

How it is possible for everyone else to challenge them ? if i was a developer just starting out with any budget first thing i will look after was my game to be as distant from TES games as possible to avoid comparisons with the classics.

Isn't there a game in development from a European developer that is supposed to be ES like? i don't think it's been officialy announced yet, but the lead dev has hinted at it. There have been a couple interview with the dev on here. I can't remember the studio at the moment. I am going to have to go thru the archives.

Originally Posted by joxer
Right or wrong, Thrasher is correct in the end.

It's all CEOs call. In every case, it's CEO who will decide if the company will take risk of making something or not making something. There are many CEOs out there that don't care, don't have guts or whatever needed to make an epic game. 99% of them are blessing only "grab the money and run" projects. And if the project is mindless shooter and endless mobrespawning grinder, the percent raises to 99.99. Most CEOs think that players are just dumb cows to milk. Nothing more.

This is actually true and false.

In my company I'm the CEO and owner and the buck stops with me. I make or approve every decision and take full responsibility for the success or failure of the business.

That's not true in other companies though. In some the CEO is merely part of a board and gets a vote that's no more important than the next persons on the board.

In some companies the board of directors hires the CEO and then supervises them as a checks and balance system. In this situation the board can actually fire the CEO thus giving the board much power.

In still other companies the CEO is nothing more than a figurehead and face of the company. There to carry out the orders of the person or people who are really running the company.( such as an owner, board or investors) In this case the CEO will often shoulder the blame or credit for the company but actually will have very little to do with the decisions made.

In short the amount of power or lack thereof is highly dependent on how the company's bylaws are setup. So just because someone has the title of CEO doesn't mean the buck necessarily stops with them.

As far as competition. What about gothic 3, fallout 3 and new Vegas and as others have mentioned two worlds.

The TES series is well respected. The things that offers are the best in their category.
Also, they have managed a solid brand name all these years.
So, it's a big risk for competitors to get in a duell with TES.

Originally Posted by akarthis
The TES series is well respected. The things that offers are the best in their category.
Also, they have managed a solid brand name all these years.
So, it's a big risk for competitors to get in a duell with TES.

Hopefully, for TES lovers, someone, eventually, will.

Perhaps following the wave of Skyrim's success some developer somewhere has begun working on their own huge open world AAA sandbox RPG. To do it right takes a lot of time, so we won't even know about it for a few years, certainly not until the next console generation.

The game world might not be quite as large as a TES or Fallout game, but my understanding is that Cyberpunk 2077 will be an open world, sandbox-style RPG.

I suppose the levels were larger than those of a corridor-type game, with more free roam area, but I wouldn't consider Divinity 2 to be an open world sandbox RPG.

It was more of a hub and spoke type game, with new areas unlocked as you progress through the main quest.

Despite some intro cut scenes that were way too long, I liked Divinity 2 at first, but after playing several hours I noticed I was spending most of the game playing time just standing around waiting to heal.

There is no wait or sleep function in the game and you heal very slowly outside of combat, so you end up standing around doing nothing quite a lot in that game.

This is compounded by the fact that most enemies stand around in groups in a rather strange way, simply waiting for the player, akin to the way combat encounters are designed in an MMO. As a result, I was standing around most of the time near the edge of groups of enemies who never noticed or attempted to attack, just waiting for my health bar to refill.

The only game that I can think of that surpasses Skyrim in terms of scale, factions, story, choices and consequences, UI, soundtrack, and VO is Gothic 3, but we all know how this turned up when it was released. It is just a huge gamble to make a game at this scale with belivable, interactive world.

The other novel game that I think that can challange Skyrim is Mount & Blade (2 hopefully). It has a huge open world with choice and consequences, factions, companions, trading and reputation system that bypasses the technological difficulty of generating a fully rendered 1st person open world with an interactive map and real time third person magnificent combat with so much control and strategy. Looking forward to Mount & Blade 2.

What I want from a "simulation style" sandbox RPG, is a static world, hand-placed loot, lots of clothes and armor customization, dangerous zones, dangerous dungeons, the ability to be outgunned at some point but you level up to get stronger and come back and wreak havoc, more non-combat skills and abilities, actual artifacts that are just hidden in caves/ruins and not necessarily quest-only, lots of guilds and factions, choices to make in said guilds that could exclude you from other guilds, etc etc.

Most of what I'm asking for is Morrowind 2.0. Oblivion and Skyrim are great but they just don't continue what Morrowind started, they went a different direction in many ways. Yes they are the closest to Morrowind overall, but still much different.

And Divinity 2 is a good game, but like JDR said, it's not TES style. I want a simulation style lose-yourself-in-the-immersion first-person sandbox RPG from another company that's not Bethesda. I'm hoping it happens in the next generation of consoles since those types of games should be easier to make when you have better hardware specifications.

Originally Posted by DarNoor
Isn't there a game in development from a European developer that is supposed to be ES like? i don't think it's been officialy announced yet, but the lead dev has hinted at it. There have been a couple interview with the dev on here. I can't remember the studio at the moment. I am going to have to go thru the archives.

It's being developed by a Czech studio called Warhorse. Warhorse is led by Dan Vávra, who directed the first Mafia and was lead designer on the second game. It's described as a Semi open world medieval RPG based on historic Europe.

Originally Posted by Pessimeister
And I don't buy your generalisation about CEO's for a second. It's absurdly simplistic and doesn't take into account the discussions that actually go on during board meetings and the influences and roles that other members can actually have in the decision making process.

Its not a generalization at all. Money is the motivator of every company. Making just enough is never good enough. There are many reasons and that's why the guy at the top is never a gamer or a developer. I posted a link on a bioware topic were a video explains the whole process.

Originally Posted by Fluent
What I want from a "simulation style" sandbox RPG, is a static world, hand-placed loot, lots of clothes and armor customization, dangerous zones, dangerous dungeons, the ability to be outgunned at some point but you level up to get stronger and come back and wreak havoc, more non-combat skills and abilities, actual artifacts that are just hidden in caves/ruins and not necessarily quest-only, lots of guilds and factions, choices to make in said guilds that could exclude you from other guilds, etc etc.

Mount and Blade 2 won't be a challenger either, at least to Skyrim. There isn't a lick of magic in Mount and Blade, it is a medieval combat simulator. Whether MB2 will be more than that, remains to be seen. Dark Souls and M&B are all about the combat and everything else takes a back seat. Actually, everything else is a speck of rust on the license plate at the very end of the vehicle

DArtagnan

When gothic 3 was patched enough to play I felt that game world is much more realistic compared to oblivion.Factions that exclude one another,quests from different quest lines that effect one another in some way,more realistic NPCs(this goes for any gothic game but G3 has more TES scale world).So challenger to skyrim?I would say Gothic 5.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
It's being developed by a Czech studio called Warhorse. Warhorse is led by Dan Vávra, who directed the first Mafia and was lead designer on the second game. It's described as a Semi open world medieval RPG based on historic Europe.